Global Finance

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

What Future For Emerging Markets?
Foreign Policy
Long before the current market debacle, I was confronted with a fundamental question about emerging markets. As I was finishing off my course at the Yale School of Management on “The Future of Global Finance” this past May, a student came up to me. “You have gone to great lengths to emphasize the role of emerging markets in a changing monetary system, “ he said, “ but everything I have been reading says that the era of the Brazils, the Indias, the Turkeys, the Indonesias as up-and-comers is history. Even China seems to have lost its luster. Have you been looking backwards and not forward?”

How Africa can benefit from the data revolution
The Guardian
The UN has estimated that across the world more people have access to mobile phones than to toilets. It is of course distressing to imagine what this means for many people’s exposure to disease and access to clean water, but the choice of mobile phone for the comparative statistic actually offers a great deal of hope. The mobile phone is part of a phenomenon where a new infrastructure is emerging, one that could bring the economic changes that enable those toilets to be built. Our modern infrastructure is based on information. Since the 1950s, investment in data storage and distribution by companies and countries has been massive. Historically, data was centralised a single database. Perhaps one for representing the health of a nation, and another database for monitoring social security. However, the advent of the internet is showing that many of our existing data systems are no longer fit for purpose.

On May 2 this year, Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the gigantic Wall Street bank, was interviewed on CNN by Fareed Zakaria (his show is Global Public Square). Towards the end of the interview, Blankfein set up a striking distinction between the two publics of Goldman Sachs, as he saw them, and the ethical standards relevant to each public. The exchange is worth quoting in full:

ZAKARIA:We're back with the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein. And finally, when George W. Bush tried to persuade Hank Paulson to become secretary of Treasury, as you know, he tried a couple of times and finally, he got Paulson to agree. It was a great coup to have gotten the chairman of Goldman Sachs, the most storied name in finance, to come to his administration and now, here you are with a very different reputation, particularly in the public's eyes. Do you think you can right, do you think that a few years from now, this will all have passed and Goldman Sachs will still be regarded with the same kind of awe and admiration it was or is that world over?